“Magic Mike”: Stripping With Soul

As Dallas, the master of revels at a male strip club in the new movie “Magic Mike,” Matthew McConaughey, now in his early forties, looks like a muscular Peking duck—his flesh still has that golden-orange glow that has always made it impossible to take him seriously as an actor. Yet here’s the surprise: in “Magic Mike,” he gives the best performance of his life. It’s not his movie (Channing Tatum is the star), but McConaughey, standing in front of an excited audience of young women, writhes and gyrates and then entices the crowd with his Texas croon—he’s the candy man bringing mostly naked young men out onstage for the women’s pleasure. He keeps the night going, no matter what. Urging on the dancers, and sometimes performing himself, Dallas is as much the essence of show-business sleaze as Joel Grey’s master of ceremonies was in “Cabaret” forty years ago. We accept McConaughey’s glazed body as an artifact of the strip world. For once, it looks right—it’s a suit of armor.

For about three-quarters of an hour, “Magic Mike” is great fun. The picture is set in Tampa, where Channing Tatum, when he was eighteen, worked as a stripper. It’s a warm-weather, pleasure-centered life, in which people may make friends with just a couple of words, go to bed with a nod, and no one takes himself very seriously. The director, Steven Soderbergh, working from a script by Reid Carolin, creates an easy colloquial rhythm. Some of the most evocative scenes are built around a few casual exchanges, the slangy patter of the strip club where people have been working together for years. At the same time, Carolin and Soderbergh have done something smart: they’ve grounded the pleasure world in the cash-strapped realities of the moment. Magic Mike (Tatum), as he’s called at the club, where he’s the star, has several businesses going on the side; he puts up roofing on new houses during the day, and he dreams of designing custom furniture. He takes under his wing a nineteen-year-old college dropout, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who’s completely broke, and shoves him out onto the stage. Adam is a good-looking kid, and even though he doesn’t have the right moves, he wows the women (in truth, they don’t seem hard to impress). As the movie tells it (at least at first), stripping is good work. You’re an adored performer, entertaining women who shower you with cash and demand nothing more. The movie sells the club as a haven of harmless naughtiness and fervent fantasy.

Channing Tatum has a gentle way about him and a murmuring voice. In the past, he seemed a little vague, not quite there. He played a dumbbell in “21 Jump Street” so well that one wondered about him. But he’s fully in focus here without losing the soft smile that makes him a dreamboat. And on the dance floor, he’s dynamite (he hasn’t forgotten the moves). He throws himself around, shucks off his clothes with an insolent twist, grinds the floor, hoists women into his lap. The numbers, most of them involving five or six men on a small stage, were choreographed by Alison Faulk, who has worked for Madonna and other pop stars. Faulk uses military and police regalia (shades of the Village People, from decades ago), and amazingly, the numbers work as dance, not just as crude erotic play. At times, “Magic Mike” feels like a tawdry backstage musical.

The rest of “Magic Mike,” however, is drearily conventional. The filmmakers turn the material into a morality play. Adam has a sister, a medical technician, Brooke (Cody Horn), who disapproves of stripping. She’s not a prude, but she thinks that it’s a lousy way of life. Mike wants her because she’s (apparently) the one young woman in town that he can’t have. Suddenly, the club scene turns sour and criminal, and Brooke becomes the means of Mike’s redemption. But why does he need to be redeemed? Earlier, the movie presented him as an enterprising young man with talent. It turns out that the women at the club (and by extension in the movie audience) are just excitable fools, but the good girl who couldn’t care less about stripping attracts the naked prince. After all the enjoyable sleaze, virtue wins in the end. Soderbergh and Reid Carolin have it both ways: first they sell the club life to us as a harmless turn-on, even cool, and then they go for moral uplift. The strategy may be commercially shrewd, but “Magic Mike,”in the end, borders on hypocrisy.

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